I have been given an old Compaq AP400 (450 mhz 128mb RAM) Professional Workstation with an 8gb SCSI Hard Drive; a good candiate for slack 10.2.... or so i thought.

I have used Slackware on and off for a few years and this one has me stumped.

A fresh install, no problems there, got to the Lilo loader bit, no hints of any problems until the reboot came... "No system disk error...", So i put the install disk back in and used it to boot up my fresh installed system and no probs there. I then tried installing lilo to MBR, then root, then i even made a new partion, called it /boot and using the boot config in KDE control panel/liloconfig made the necessary changes; I ensured that cfdisk was showing the relevant partition bootable as i changed from MBR, root etc... but still no joy. LILO conf is all ok, its just not physically seeing LILO on boot up.

I have done some googling on this and there should be a compaq diagnostic partition on the hd, this has gone. I cant see how this will mess things up but you never know.

Any help would be appreciated on this, i dont want to put Window's on this machine, I want to get it up and running and give it to my daughter.

Cheers

what does lilo show when you run it?also, is the disk set as primary master?? if not, perhaps your specific BIOS would be happier if it was?? anyways, it's just a thought...

Various possibilities:

1. In your BIOS boot sequence, is the floppy listed before the hard drive, and do you have a (non-bootable) floppy inserted? If so, pop it out

2. If you're using lilo, did you upgrade the kernel? If so, you need to rerun lilo (the program). As root
3. Could you post the contents of your lilo.conf file, and your /etc/fstab That would be helpful in attempting to figure out what the issue might be.

PS: FWIW I applaud your decision to guide your kids towards the penguin...

In a normal case, Lilo should not be installed to the superblock. You should always install Lilo to the MBR.

Linux partitions do not have to be marked bootable to be booted by any of the popular bootloaders such as Lilo, Grub, etc.

I know this doesn't solve your problem directly but there is a lot of confusion in this thread and these two facts will eventually help.

Hi,

Do you have the virus protection set in your BIOS?

Hi All,

I have an old compaq:

-for me any other operating system than a Fat32 type throws my pc a curveball.

I suspect these old compaq bios's do NOT like having their boot records changed over and over on the fly.

I can't even hit 'restart' or 'reboot' as when the pc does reboot and I get the compaq screen, the video melts and the pc freezes.

So I don't 'reboot' or do 'restart' the pc. If I need to reboot, I just do shutdown, wait a few seconds or however long it takes to let the hardrives spin down...then power backup.

edited for clarity.